MAN : THE RAINBOW by Osho

Man is a rainbow, all the seven colors together. That is his beauty and that is his problem too. Man is multi-faceted, multi-dimensional. His being is not simple, it is a great complexity. And out of that complexity is born the harmony we call God: the divine melody.

Man is a bridge between the animal and the divine. The animals are tremendously happy -- of course not aware, not CONSCIOUSLY happy, but tremendously happy, unworried, non-neurotic. God is tremendously happy and conscious. Man is just in between the two, in limbo, always wavering -- to be or not to be?

Man is a rainbow, I say, because a rainbow will give you the total perspective in which man can be understood -- from the lowest to the highest. The rainbow has seven colors, man has seven centers of his being. The allegory of the seven is very ancient. In India, the allegory has taken the form of seven chakras: the lowest is MULADHAR and the highest is SAHASRAR and between these two are five steps, five more chakras. And man has to pass through all these seven chakras -- seven steps towards the divine.

"Remember, seven is a very significant number.

To be more modern and contemporary, I would like to divide these seven centers in this way. The first I call NO-MIND. `No-mind' means mind is fast asleep -- MULADHAR. it is there, but so fast asleep that you cannot even detect it. In the rock, God is fast asleep. In the man he has become a little alert -- just a LITTLE alert, not very much. In the rock he is fast asleep, snoring. If you listen closely you will hear the snoring... God snoring. That's why rocks are so beautiful -- so deeply silent, no turmoil, no anxiety, nowhere to go. This I call no-mind. I don't mean by `no-mind' that they have NO mind; I simply mean the mind has not manifested yet. The mind is waiting in seed, the mind is getting ready to awake, the mind is preparing, the mind is resting. Sooner or later there will be the morning and the rock will become a bird and will start flying, or will become a tree and will start blossoming.

The second state I call UNCONSCIOUS MIND. In the trees, the mind is there -- not like the rock, God has become a little different from the rock. Not conscious, UNconscious. Trees feel -- they cannot feel that they feel, but they feel. Listen to the difference. If you hit a tree she feels it, but she cannot feel that she feels it. That much awareness has not happened. Feeling has come in, the tree is sensitive. And now there are modern experiments proving it, that trees are tremendously sensitive.

This I call unconscious mind. Mind is there... almost like one is asleep. In the morning one remembers that it was a beautiful night and "I slept deeply, the sleep was very profound." But you remember in the morning, not when the actual sleep is happening; you remember later on, retrospectively. Mind was there in sleep, but was not functioning at that moment; it only functions retrospectively, later on. In the morning you remember -- a beautiful night, such a soothing and satiny night, such deep silence and such happiness -- but you recognize it in the morning.

The third state is SUBCONSCIOUS mind. Subconscious mind is in the birds, animals. It is like dreaming. In a dream you become a little more conscious than you become conscious in your sleep. Let us say the rocks are in a coma; in the morning they will not even be able to remember how profound was the sleep -- it is a coma. The trees are in a sleep; when they awake, they will remember. The birds and the animals are dreaming -- they are very close to humanity. I call this subconscious mind.

The fourth I call CONSCIOUS MIND. That's where man is. Not very conscious; just a flicker, just a small wave of consciousness -- and that too happens only when you are in tremendous danger, otherwise not. If somebody suddenly comes and is ready to kill you with a dagger, you will become conscious. In that moment there will be tremendous awareness, intelligence, radiance. Thinking will stop. You will become a flame. Only in rare moments do you really become conscious; otherwise, you move almost like a somnambulist. I have heard...

In 1959, two drunkards in the French town of Vienne opened what they thought was a door to the street. Actually it was the window of a room four storeys up. With a gay song on their lips they marched out, arm in arm over the sill to the street below. A beat policeman, hearing the thuds and rushing to help, was dumbfounded to watch them careering away, still singing and obviously in tip-top condition. "We missed our step," they explained.

They were not aware at all. Had they been aware, they might have died. They were not aware; they simply thought they had missed a step. Four storeys!
And this is your situation too. Your whole life is almost that of a drunkard. You go on stumbling here and there, missing one step here, another step there. Your whole life is nothing but misery upon misery, stumbling, bumping into each other. You may call it love, but what it comes to is just bumping into each other. It creates misery.

Only consciousness can give ecstasy. Ecstasy is the shadow of consciousness. This is the fourth stage in which ordinarily human beings live and die. This is a sheer wastage. Rocks can be forgiven and trees can be forgiven and birds can be forgiven, but not man -- because you have the first glimpse: now it is your responsibility to grow it, to make it more solid, to make it stronger. You cannot say to a rock: "You missed," but you can say to a man: "You missed."

Man is the only responsible animal -- he can be asked, he will have to answer: that is the meaning of responsibility. One day or other, he will have to answer to God or to the center of this existence or to existence itself: "How did you miss? You were given the rudimentary beginning, you could have grown it. You were given the seed, you could have blossomed. Why did you miss?"

That's the anxiety of man, the agony, the trembling, the anguish -- because man is the only animal in this world who can become ecstatic, who can achieve to conscious blissfulness, who can become SATCHITANAND: who can become truth, consciousness, being, who can become bliss, who can come to the ultimate.

The fifth I call SUBSUPERCONSCIOUS MIND. At the fourth stage -- the conscious mind -- your consciousness is just a very flickering thing, very momentary, with no stability, comes and goes, and is beyond your power; you cannot recall it when it is needed. All religions exist between conscious mind and superconscious mind. All techniques of yoga, all techniques as such, are nothing but to transform your consciousness into superconsciousness. Gurdjieff calls it self-remembering. Kabir calls it SURATI YOGA -- `surati' also means remembering. Jesus says again and again: Be aware! Be awake! Watch! Buddha says: Be alert. Krishnamurti goes on talking about awareness; for forty years he has been talking about only one thing, and that is awareness. One word is the whole message: that word is the bridge between conscious mind and superconscious mind.

When your consciousness has become a stable factor in you, an integrated factor in you, a crystallized factor in you, and you can depend on it.... Right now, you cannot depend on it. You are going along, very conscious, and somebody hits you -- immediately the consciousness is gone; it is not dependable. Somebody says a simple word, somebody says to you, "Are you an idiot?" -- and consciousness is gone. Just the word "idiot" and your eyes are bloodshot, and you are ready to be killed or to kill.

Even people who seem to be very very alert and aware may be just alert and aware because they have escaped the situations. Their alertness is not real. You can go to the Himalayas, you can sit in a cave -- nobody will come to call you an idiot. Who will take such a bother to come to the Himalayan cave to call you an idiot? Of course you will not get angry. Your state of awareness in a Himalayan cave is not worth much, because there is no test for it, no possibility to destroy it. Hence, Kabir says: Be in the world. Don't be of the world, but be in the world, live in the world. Live in the ordinary situations where everything provokes you to be unconscious and everybody helps you to be conscious.

If you understand it, the world is a great device of God to make you more conscious. Your enemy is your friend, and the curses are blessings, and the misfortunes can be turned into fortunes. It depends only on one thing: if you know the key of awareness. Then you can turn everything into gold. When somebody insults, that is the moment to keep alert. When your wife looks at somebody else and you feel hurt, that is the moment to keep alert. When you are feeling sad, gloomy, depressed, when you feel the whole world is against you, that is the moment to be alert. When you are surrounded by a dark night, that is the moment to keep your light burning. And all these situations will prove helpful -- they are meant for it.

From conscious mind to superconscious mind is all yoga, meditation, prayer, awareness. Subsuperconscious mind is an integrated phenomenon, but you will still lose it sometimes. Not ordinarily when you are wakeful, but when you go to sleep you may lose it. Subsuperconscious mind will help you while you are wakeful, and sometimes even in dreams you may remember -- but not in deep sleep. When Krishna says in the Gita, "The yogi is awake even when the whole world sleeps," he is indicating towards a higher state which I call the sixth -- SUPERCONSCIOUS MIND. Then one remains alert even while asleep; deep asleep, but awareness remains there. This is the sixth. And out of this sixth, the seventh grows spontaneously -- you have not to do anything for it.

That seventh I again call NO-MIND, to make the circle complete. The first is the no-mind of a rock and the last is the no-mind of a god. To show this unity, we have sculptured gods in stone. To show this unity, this circle complete, we have made stone statues of God to show that stone is the first and God is the last and both meet somewhere. Again, no-mind -- call it soul, God, enlightenment, nirvana, salvation, or whatsoever you choose to call it.

These are the seven stages. And this is the rainbow a man is. One thing more, then we enter into the sutras, and that is: not a single color has to be denied. All the colors have to be absorbed in the rainbow, and all the notes of music, all the seven notes of music, have to become part of the melody, and all these seven chakras from MULADHAR to SAHASRAR, they have to become a unity. It is not that you have to deny some chakras, because that denied chakra will not allow you ever to become whole -- and one who is not whole can never be holy. They all have to form a hierarchy, a unity; they all have to belong to one center.

A real man of religion lives the whole rainbow, from the rock to God -- from no-mind on this end to the no-mind on the other end. He is the whole spectrum. He lives life totally. Nothing is denied, everything is used. Nothing is denied at all; if something feels like a jarring note, that simply means you have not yet been able to utilize it. It can be used, the poison can become medicinal -- you have to know how to transform it. And sometimes the nectar can be poisonous if you don't know how to use it.

If you know how to use anger, you will see anger gives you a sharpness of being -- just as if somebody has sharpened a sword. Anger rightly used gives you a sharpness, a radiance, a tremendous vitality. Sex rightly used makes you so full of love that you can go on sharing with all and sundry and it is never exhausted. Sex rightly used gives a rebirth to yourself. Ordinarily, it reproduces children; extraordinarily, it reproduces your innermost being.

Everything that you have has to fall into a unity.

Once a very rich man asked Pablo Picasso to make a portrait of him, and as Picasso was well-known he demanded a very fantastic price for it -- millions of dollars. The rich man said, "That's okay, you just do the portrait."

The portrait was finished. Came the rich man. He was not satisfied; he said, "For that much money... and what have you done? Just an ordinary canvas and a few colors."

Picasso said, "Just a few colors and an ordinary canvas? Wait." He went into his studio, brought a big canvas and many tubes of colors and brushes and gave them to him and said, "You can make your portrait yourself. And I will not charge for it at all. You can take these colors, these brushes and this canvas as a gift from me."

Then the rich man understood. It is not the colors, it is the combination. It is not the canvas, it is not the brush, it is the artist behind it -- one who has combined all together and has created a new unity which never existed before. Those colors were separate, that canvas was just dead. Now it has become alive; now it speaks a language, sings a song. It is not just colors -- a greater harmony has descended in those colors, a music has arisen out of them.

Let me tell you that whatsoever you have, all has to be used -- nothing is useless. Never throw anything away, otherwise you will repent one day. All has to be used. Just become more insightful, more mindful, become more aware, and start looking into things of your inner being and how to bring them to a higher harmony -- that's all. Right now you ar a crowd. Right now you are not an individual. You are not a rainbow -- all the colors are falling in separate dimensions, moving away from each other; they don't have a center. Right now you are a noise, not music -- but remember, in the noise all the notes are present. Rearranged, arranged in a better, aesthetic, artistic way, they will become beautiful music. All that is needed is a deep aesthetic look into your being


Review - This is going to take time to understand, very cheem.